IBM Data Services Coming to the Cloud

IBM this week announced its Watson Analytics service and other data-driven offerings would soon be available on its Cloud marketplace.

That was one of many data-related initiatives unveiled by the company during its Insight 2014 conference held in Las Vegas, furthering its goal of providing products and services to democratize Big Data and similar technologies by putting advanced analytics into the hands of more users.

"Businesses, developers and individuals will have the ability to incorporate data-driven decision making into every business decision," IBM said. "Access to cloud-based analytics services such as IBM Watson Analytics can put powerful analytics in the hands of individuals to help them see patterns, pursue ideas and improve all types of decisions without needing to tap into a data scientist."

Watson, the IBM supercomputer known for beating the best humans on the "Jeopardy!" TV game show and then moving on to more serious matters, will soon be available on the company's Cloud marketplace.

The Cognos Business Intelligence and SPSS predictive analytics platforms are also scheduled to become available on the cloud marketplace. The former is now in beta with general production availability expected early next year. The latter is expected to be available within 30 days.

Additionally, five "solution accelerators" for data professionals were announced, combining pre-integrated software packages and services to help customer, operations, security and fraud, risk and compliance, and data warehouse modernization initiatives.

IBM also announced a new generation of cloud-based data services -- DataWorks, dashDB and Cloudant Local -- that the company said will enable organizations to:

Simplify and automate the ability to find, refine and prepare data.

Warehouse data in the cloud, making it instantly available for analytics.

Curate unstructured data services to increase the confidence in analytics.

Coming later this year will be IBM Watson Curator, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that will provide governance of Watson Solutions and, for example, guide subject matter experts through the data curation process to increase confident delivery of quality content collections.

"Unlike other offerings that address only one aspect of the data problem, the new services introduced by IBM today provide the key capabilities to help organizations shift from working on the data to putting data to work for their business," the company said in a statement. "These new innovations will help ensure that data flows seamlessly to applications and analytics, making them portable and accessible, no matter where the data resides."